I found this old clip from our Action Essentials 2 film shoot. We used powerful air canons to create huge fireballs and I thought it was a good opportunity to run away from one in slow motion. Thanks to John and Ben for this candid moment.

And YES it is a REAL explosion, that’s why it looks fake! [Sound Fx added]

Wishing everyone a happy and safe holiday from the Kramer family and everyone at Video Copilot! Thank you guys for being part of this amazing community, we are beyond excited for next year since it will be the the 10 year anniversary of Video Copilot. I can’t even begin to express what that means to me, […]

One of my favorite new features in Element 3D V2 is the new 3D Noise options and deformation! Here are a few experiments where I use various bends and twists along with 3D distortion to stretch a sphere around. I don’t know what these things are but I feel like eating ice cream and licorice now! […]

Welcome back everyone! 2015 is upon us and we are getting busy! In this exciting new tutorial we’ll be creating a fun cascading polygon using some sweet animation tricks! This technique is highly customizable so you can start experimenting now! It’s 2015 let’s push things to the next level and learn everything we can! Watch on Youtube […]

@Gabriel F.
Our viewing system (eyes + brain) notices "fluid movement" from 10 fps. Anything below that looks scratchy and even shaking (if you take an old CRT and down the refresh time you will notice). When you increase the framerate, you begin to see more "realistic" things, like motion blur and the space between "blacks" gets shorter.

That´s why the cinema standard is at 24 fps, double the minimum.

But, don´t get confused with the 50/60 from the PAL/NTSC systems. Those were setted up that way because of the AC supply standards.

hahaha I actually felt the explosion looked odd at first, and then thought it was well thought compositing. No wonder it's real.
If you're shooting in broad daylight, in the desert, you'll probably have a very closed f/stop (among other things) so as to not overexpose and that's why that kind of orange perfectly exposed color would be natural in an explosion, as opposed to a blown out explosion with a glare that may look cool but unreal (that may be true on a nighttime shot...).
A VFX compositor needs to know photography to do a good job. Also studying real footage or practical effects on films is useful.
Just like what happened with the shattered glass effect, people tend to suspect on any effect and think "hey that's 3-D! And that's AE! And that's been photoshopped!", etc.
Well, I wrote too much and wanna leave the PC. Hopefully I've made some sense.